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Big City

An Activist Ambushed de Blasio at His Gym. She Raised a Good Point.

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De Blasio Dismisses Activist: ‘I’m in the Middle of Doing My Workout’

Nathylin Flowers Adesegun confronted the mayor about his affordable housing plan while he was working out at the Y.M.C.A in Park Slope, Brooklyn, on Friday.

“Hi. How do you do?” “Hey.” “Out of 300,00 New Yorkers, out of the 300,00 units ...” “What’s that now? Hey, guys, I’m in the middle of doing my workout. Sorry, I can’t do this now.” “In your affordable housing program only 5 percent will go to help the homeless. Can you look me in the eye and tell me why ...” “Why won’t you commit more housing for homeless New Yorkers, Mayor de Blasio? 5 percent? 5 percent is not adequate. 5 percent is not adequate for homeless New Yorkers. We need housing for homeless New Yorkers.”

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Nathylin Flowers Adesegun confronted the mayor about his affordable housing plan while he was working out at the Y.M.C.A in Park Slope, Brooklyn, on Friday.CreditCredit...Christopher Lee for The New York Times

Since the beginning of his mayoralty, Bill de Blasio has continued the routine of going to a gym in Brooklyn most weekday mornings — and by morning we do not mean an hour at which titans get on their Peloton bikes, but rather at a time iron welders might label early afternoon — 11 miles from his home in Gracie Mansion.

The practice, which involves getting to the gym via S.U.V. as the mayor has called for New Yorkers to curtail their own environmentally insidious habits, has brought him repeated criticism, which he consistently dismisses as nonsensical, which in turn only confirms the underlying charge of arrogance.

Seizing on the Park Slope Y.M.C.A as his vulnerable place, protesters often come to air grievances just outside. But one day last week, an activist approached Mr. de Blasio on an exercise mat as he was stretching his adductors, to ask him why there were not more apartments allotted for the homeless as part of the city’s affordable housing plan.

The gesture of theatricality delivered the predictable result: the mayor smiled and refused to engage, just as I imagine a pathologist would if she were ambushed in the frozen-food aisle by a patient who wanted to talk about a biopsy. But the question posed — why, out of a prospective 300,000 units — created for people of low and moderate incomes, are just 15,000 dedicated for those with no place to live? — is crucial to understanding the limited ambitions around fighting homelessness and how easily even modest goals are thwarted or mishandled.

The entwined crises of housing affordability and homelessness, decades in the making, have been the most consistently vexing to the de Blasio administration. Early last year the mayor outlined a series of goals and strategies that he called a “blood and guts” war on homelessness, including reducing the nightly count of people in shelters by 2,500 and opening 40 new shelters by the end of this year, with 50 more by 2022. So far, only 16 of those shelters are up and functioning.

While our current moment has many lamenting the death of democracy at the federal level, locally, tensions play out differently. In fact, in many cases, there is perhaps far too much input, as the increasing concentration of wealth and progressive energy in major cities has come with greater allowances toward a certain brand of entitled self-governance. In New York, during the Koch and Giuliani years, for example, a shelter would arrive on a block because the city had decided to put it there, and if you lived in the neighborhood, you would hear about it when it opened.

But now deference is paid across the spectrum of opinion. We solicit ideas and hold community board meetings; environmental impact studies are generated. And then lawsuits are filed to fight shelters when neighborhoods don’t want them. This happens again and again in a kind of civic amnesia, even as communities usually find shelters far less troubling than anticipated once they are in place. Two years ago, I wrote about a shelter in the Kensington section of — Brooklyn, which first met with neighborhood resistance and then emerged as the recipient of local largess, as people from the community began donating diapers and toys.

Legal battles have delayed the opening of two shelters recently, one on West 58th Street, bordering some of the most expensive real estate in the city, and another in Ozone Park, Queens, where one man went on a hunger strike to make his opposition clear.

Another impediment to progress, and one that goes almost entirely unremarked, is the simple horror of trying to get anything built in New York. The city itself does not build shelters or convert existing structures into shelters — there is no capital budget for this. Developers do that work, in what is a very lucrative business, making money on what the city pays them in rent. Developers and social-service agencies are typically left to scout empty buildings and lots, and the agencies then run shelters through city contracts.

That system might work seamlessly if the city did more to fast-track the construction or renovation logistics. But shelters too often get caught up in the morass of building permits and filings that invariably slow things down. The paperwork for turning a tenement building into a site for supportive housing should not take as long as the paperwork for renovating a West Village townhouse.

Christine Quinn, the former City Council speaker, who now runs Win, the biggest provider of shelter for homeless families in the city, experienced this not long ago. Win had a project in Coney Island delayed because the city mistakenly described the site for a prospective shelter as a waterfront property. Correcting that simple error took months, she told me.

The homeless population has grown by nearly 10,000 since Mr. de Blasio took office four years ago; there are now around 62,000 people in the shelter system every night. By almost any metric, this is an unqualified failure.

But these statistics obscure some of the success that has been achieved in forestalling an even more disastrous outcome. Over the past few years, both employment rates and median household income have gone up in the city, and poverty has fallen — below 20 percent for the first time in years. Yet this has meant virtually nothing in the face of continually escalating housing costs.

Part of the reason the city has set aside just 5 percent of affordable housing for the homeless is that there are other desperate populations to accommodate — thousands living on the precipice, close to losing their apartments at any time because of rising rents, venal landlords and so on.

Beyond that, in the current political climate, the city can never be sure what kind of federal money will be available to subsidize rents for the lowest earners — primarily in the form of Section 8 vouchers, a Nixon-administration initiative, it always bears repeating.

Over the past year or so, the homeless count has essentially stabilized, thanks in part to the work the city has put into preventing evictions, even as hundreds of refugees have entered the shelter system from Puerto Rico in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria. Since 2014, in fact, the city has moved close to 100,000 people out of the shelter system into permanent housing.

The tragedy is that they are always being replaced.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section MB, Page 3 of the New York edition with the headline: Housing the Homeless Is a Heavy Lift. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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